Exhibiting Text

Some of the work I’m making has trouble sitting in the world. With the ocagraph and the cut-up books and the marked-up books there’s some tension about whether they’re real or not – are they examples? Propositions? Who’s meant to have made them? Doing some experiments with one of the cut-up books yesterday morning it became clear that I have to think of them as propositions or they don’t do the right thing.

With this in mind, I want to go over my ideas for exhibiting the body of work I’ve made over the past year. My intention up to today has been to put all the work on a desk in boxes and files – like a reading room – and to display a schema charting the relationships between the works.

It’s important for my works to be shown in groups because they communicate amongst themselves. I’ve been circling around some quite tight ideas this year, and the relationships between the nodes are important. I’ve been imagining presenting the relationship schema as the body of work itself, with the individual works it consists of being elsewhere, as objects. (In this respect I might call the schema itself ex-centric.)

The problem is with the works themselves, which will be available to view as physical things. The texts are the things that throw it all off. If there were only objects, the relations between them would be more straightforward and I could just, say, put them all in boxes. But as it is, everything would be in the room differently.

I’d like to think about the possibility of making the whole lot of work into a book. If the works are propositions, do they need to actually be in the space or would they be better as photographs? In a book, the schema would appear on one page, and the images and texts on other pages, an arrangement that would attend nicely to the dual positioning of the work, both ‘really’ in the schema and ‘really’ elsewhere.

The texts I’m going to present are like most texts in that they’re somewhere between real objects and photographs of objects. Because they can be reprinted in new or identical forms, any particular instance of the text is one of many like a photograph. But like real objects, there is no further reality that the text refers onwards to. A photograph calls to an original artefact, a text, though multiple, is as close as you’re going to get to the original artefact. If we can speak of an artefact of a text exists only in multiple. I’d be interested in presenting texts printed on photographic paper, to imply the lacking antecedent.

This is a good plan. And it means the space I’ve booked for the exhibition can find a new purpose…